Back to the Feature: Zero-Shot 6DoF Pose Estimation via Dense Local Features

Real-time 6DoF object pose estimation on resource-constrained hardware remains challenging, as accurate correspondence-based and refinement pipelines typically rely on non-differentiable PnP/RANSAC stages or costly iterative refinement, while recent foundation-model-based approaches incur inference costs that are prohibitive for edge deployment. We present TinyDETR-Pose, a lightweight, end-to-end, single-stage framework that jointly detects objects and regresses their full 6D pose in a single forward pass. Built on the efficient LW-DETR architecture, TinyDETR-Pose formulates detection and pose estimation as a set-prediction problem and attaches dedicated MLP heads for rotation, monocular depth, and projected object center regression to each decoder query, eliminating the need for PnP, NMS (non-maximum suppression), or iterative pose refinement. Object symmetries are handled through a ADD-S loss applied uniformly to all objects, without the need for object-specific loss schedules or separate geodesic/ADD supervision. In addition, predictions are assigned to ground truth using a symmetry-safe Hungarian matcher based on class and 2D spatial cues, yielding stable assignment under symmetry and depth ambiguity. On YCB-V, TinyDETR-Pose achieves a comparable ADD-S AUC of 85.9, while requiring up to 72.7% fewer parameters than other DETR-based single-stage pose-estimation approaches. Due to its compact design, TinyDETR-Pose runs in real time and achieves an inference latency of only ~4.5 ms per frame on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano using TensorRT, demonstrating that accurate end-to-end transformer-based 6D pose estimation can be made practical for edge deployment.

6D pose estimation remains a key challenge in robotics and computer vision, particularly in industrial environments. The deployment of currently available data-driven methods is often limited by resource-intensive data pipelines, reliance on textured 3D models, and sensitivity to geometric deviations caused by damages or assembly defects. We present PIXIE, a zero-shot framework that estimates the 6D pose of an object from an RGB image using only an untextured 3D model. Synthetic depth and normal maps are rendered from sampled reference viewpoints and matched to the query image via a pretrained cross-modality feature matcher. Matched keypoints are back-projected to obtain 2D--3D correspondences for PnP-based pose estimation. Relying exclusively on geometry makes the method inherently robust to lighting and texture variation, while correspondence filtering handles geometric deviations between the model and physical object. We evaluate on widely-used public benchmarks, reporting state-of-the-art results on texture-less objects without object-specific training, and introduce a novel dataset with assembly defects, texture variations, and occlusion to demonstrate real-world applicability.

Object 6D pose estimation formulations have progressively reduced reliance on object-specific priors, evolving from explicit 3D models to multi-view object captures to single reference images. We take this progression to its extreme by introducing prior-free relative 6D pose estimation, which lifts the assumption of knowing which object is to be posed within the scene. This novel setting aims to estimate the relative poses of multiple instances of an unknown object within the same image, without requiring CAD models, templates, or reference images. We solve this by formulating a novel method (PROSE) that finds coarse correspondences between object instances using multimodal foundation features, thus requiring no training. We refine these correspondences by imposing cycle consistency across tuples of instances, and leverage the resulting globally consistent correspondences to estimate the relative 6D pose between any pair of instances. To enable systematic evaluation, we design a novel benchmark (PRENCH) built from three multi-instance BOP datasets and enriched with task-specific metadata. PROSE consistently outperforms baselines obtained by adapting state-of-the-art single-image methods to the proposed setting, while requiring neither task-specific supervision nor additional learned components. Project website: https://tev-fbk.github.io/PROSE/